Midterms and Finals

December 1 is Tuesday, which means that it’s time to start thinking about midterms and finals! I’ve shared most of the exams that I have used in the past on this blog, but I found one today in my files that I never posted. This was the first midterm that I gave after my switch to TPRS®/CI, so while it is a good representation of things that you can do with an assessment, it is not a good representation of what my 1B assessments looked like in later years. For one, my 1B students were much stronger in later years as I developed a more organized curriculum. This midterm was given to students that went through my TPRS® learning curve with me: doing random story after random story. They acquired a lot of vocabulary, but it was seemingly random and so this midterm now seems way too easy for students that have had 1.5 years of Spanish. It was also before I began using my proficiency rubrics, so the rubric included for the speaking portion of the assessment was aligned with my school’s ELA rubrics instead of ACTFL Performance Indicators and Kelly Daugherty’s bicycles. If you can overlook those two factors, I think that the assessment can give you some good ideas of ways to assess students that have just finished a semester of storytelling and other forms of comprehensible input. As far as grading goes, my assessments get broken down into categories, and students get as many grades on the assessment as there are categories. In this case, they got one reading grade, one speaking grade, one listening grade, and one writing grade.

I have a question about the film assessments (which I love!). How do you avoid (or can you?) the students from other periods telling other students who take exams on different days the film so they can look it up and prepare? I want them to feel prepared on their own and don’t want kids in later class periods to get an advantage. Our finals are spread out over three days so there is a lot of time to pass on information…

Great question; I wish I had a better answer! It so happened that I never ran into this situation because of the timing of my class periods; even with extended testing periods, all of my Spanish 1As met on the same day, all of my Spanish 1Bs, and all of my 2s. I will think on this and see if I can come up with any ideas; in the meantime perhaps consider asking in the SOMOS Curriculum Collaboration group on Facebook! Maybe another teacher has come up with a solution!

Thank you!! I ended up giving the kids a big “talk” about how them telling their friends would probably end up hurting their friends since they would try to over complicate the issue instead of showing me what they could do with what they know. It seemed to work ok… 🙂